More Political Action Committees to Get ‘Super’ Powers?

On Tuesday, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction in the campaign finance case Carey v. Federal Election Commission.

The move opens the door for political action committees that are not connected to corporations, unions or trade associations to raise unlimited amounts of money, even if they directly donate money to candidates.

The order states that these PACs can use unlimited donations to fund their operating costs as well as political advertisements known as independent expenditures.

The ruling does not allow unlimited donations to be channeled to candidates in the form of direct donations. Instead, these non-connected PACs will need to maintain segregated accounts for campaign contributions and independent expenditures.

“The FEC wanted two separate entities,” University of California-Irvine Law School professor Rick Hasen wrote on his Election Law Blog. “The district court said segregated bank accounts and proportional sharing of expenses was enough.”

The move has been applauded by free speech advocates.

“This is a big win for the First Amendment,” Sean Parnell, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, said in a press release. “It’s time for our current campaign finance regulatory structure to be largely undone as it is overly complex, stifles too much political speech, and leaves too many Americans unsure of whether they can legally speak or not.”

Some in the campaign finance reform community, however, are less thrilled.

“Our fear here is that unregulated, soft money could be used to subsidize the administrative expenses associated with a group’s hard money activities [such as donating to candidates],” Malloy continued.

The FEC can now chose to appeal this preliminary injunction to the D.C. Circuit Court.

If it does not, the court will continue to hear the merits of the case before issuing a final decision — and in the meantime, the FEC won’t be allowed to enforce the rule requiring organizations to form a separate super PAC to raise unlimited contributions.

Except for the Revolving Door section, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License by OpenSecrets.org. To request permission for commercial use, please contact us.